Published in Symposion.
A Journal of Russian Thought,
“The fact that one can annihilate a
philosophy . ... or that one can prove that a philosophy annihilates itself is
of little consequence. If it’s really philosophy, then, like the phoenix, it will
always rise again from its own ashes.”
Friedrich
Schlegel. Athenaeum. Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow, 103.
“The Karamazovs are not scoundrels but philosophers,
because all real Russian people are philosophers..."
Dmitry
Karamazov, in Fyodor Dostoevsky. The
Brothers Karamazov
“It’s a property of the Russian people to indulge
in philosophy....The fate of the philosopher in
Nikolai
Berdyaev. The Russian Idea
Historians
of philosophy usually do not regard
It
is difficult to trace the origin of this disposition, but if we trust the
testament of ancient chronicles, Russia adopted its religious faith from a
Greek philosopher who, in 988, persuaded Prince Vladimir of the superiority of
Orthodoxy to all other Christian and non-Christian denominations. A few small
Christian communities did exist in
Similarly,
many subsequent turning points in Russian history have hinged on ideas
enthusiastically embraced by the country's rulers rather than engendered by
organic national evolution. Thus, in the 18th century, although the small educated sector of Russian
society had only recently come to apprehend the spirit of the Enlightenment,
Catherine the Great became the most thorough personification of the
"philosopher on the throne" in all of
The
19th-century tsars, beginning with Alexander the First's closing years of reign
( he died in 1825) clung to the policies of conservative synthesis expressed by
the famous formula "autocracy -
Orthodoxy - national character" [narodnost' ], and failed to provide the state with
effective intellectual leadership. Thus the task of establishing a
philosophical orientation for the society increasingly fell to the
intelligentsia, beginning in the 1820s, with revolutionaries from the nobility,
known as the Decembrists, and continuing in the 1840s, with descendants of the
middle and bourgeois classes, known as raznochintsy.
In considering the Russian intelligentsia as a social class, we should bear in mind
the original meaning of the word, which is derived from the Latin intellegentia: "the speculative capacity of human
mind, the ability to perceive logical relationships and general concepts." The social stratum that takes this name is a tangible extension of
this intellectual capacity, formed to exert the power of ideas to transform
reality. Only in
After
the Bolshevik revolution, the intelligentsia became politically dominant for
the first time, as members of this class
formed the ruling elite of what was, ironically, called "the
dictatorship of proletariat." In a sense, the revolution was a transformation
of a living historical society into a philosophical entity that would
henceforth develop according to the laws of the mind as embodied in the ideocratic state and "the ideological
activity of the Party."
Though
Bolsheviks' usurpation of Marxist ideas
took full advantage of the
Russian people's inclination "to
indulge in philosophy, ...the fate of
the philosopher in
Another
paradox concerns so-called "dialectical materialism." Marx claimed he
had turned Hegel's entire system from its head (idealism) onto its feet
(materialism), but the version of Marxism that became established in the Soviet
state drifted back toward idealism again. Materialism, though nominally an
official doctrine, became nothing more than an expression of materialistic ideology, a new tool of the
intelligentsia for mastering the material world. As Andrei Bely ironically
remarked in the early 1930s, the triumph of materialism had led to the
devastation of material life, indicating that the conditions of physical life
in the "materialist"
In
the Soviet period, it became a typical Russian trait to deduce all practical
and theoretical issues from the "highest" philosophical
considerations. The violence of the October revolution could be easily
justified as "a qualitative leap in quantitative social changes,"
while the extermination of the kulaks as a class was dictated by the necessity
to sharpen "the struggle of opposites" in the construction of a
socialist society. Nothing could be more sacred to an exemplary Soviet
citizen than "the unity and struggle of opposites" or "history
as a form of the movement of matter" (philosophical postulates and idioms
of Soviet Marxism). Neither worker nor
peasant, scientist nor politician, writer nor artist, could succeed in their
respective fields without a specific philosophical preparation in "the
dialectical forms of the movement of matter" or "the ABCs of
historical materialism." The philosophy of "dialectical
materialism" was the core of all practical decision-making: it guided the
political and economic course of the country and even determined the rules of
everyday behavior. Thus, the argument in favor of communal apartments, shared
by several families, was that they implemented the philosophy of
"collectivism" and the conditioning of "social consciousness by
social being."
Even
such questions as the ratio of epic and lyric components in literary works, or
decisions regarding the hybridization of vegetables, were treated as,
ultimately, philosophical problems. For example, the famous agricultural
scientist and plant breeder Ivan Michurin (1855-1935) enjoyed an enormous practical and ideological
support of the Soviet government because his experiments asserted the
inferiority of inborn qualities of plants to outside influences (nurturism
versus naturism) which well conformed to the philosophy of Marxism. According to a Soviet philosophical
dictionary, "Michurin's theory is based on dialectical understanding of
living nature, the recognition of the unity of the organism and external
environment, and the dependence of embryonic cells and the entire process of
fertilization from the organism's conditions of life."[2] On
the other hand, Michurin himself claimed to have conducted his experiments
under the "truly scientific" guidance of dialectical materialism; he
urged his colleagues "to raise the elaboration of philosophical problems
of biology to the highest level on the firm, unshakable foundation of
Marxist-Leninist methodology."[3]
As
philosophical faith became the ultimate rationale for economic strategy,
political institutions, scientific research and even personal opinions, the
highest goal of thought, as set by prominent prerevolutionary thinkers, such as
Vladimir Soloviev and Nikolai Fedorov, came to fruition. They had conceived
this task as the necessity to submit reality to the governance of the universal principles of total-unity, and to
transform the divided world of
conflicting private interests into a transparent kingdom of absolute ideals. This is why thought itself,
in the very moment of its triumph, became a prisoner in the
One
cannot but recall in this context a dialogue between two outstanding thinkers
of the mid-20th century, Alexander Kojeve (1908-1968), the French
philosopher of Russian origin (his real
name was Kozhevnikov), and Leo Strauss (1899-1973), the American political
scientist and historian of philosophy of German-Jewish origin.[5] In their debate on "tyranny and
wisdom" they had come to opposite conclusions. Kojeve strongly
influenced by Hegel and Heidegger assumes that "politics is derivative
from philosophy , "[6] and, conversely, that philosophy needs politics in order to
realize its ideas (even at the price of their temporary falsification) and
accomplish its ultimate goal: the construction of the universal and socially homogeneous
State. At this point, according to Kojeve, both history and philosophy achieve
their end and negate themselves by merging into one. History dissolves in the
Absolute Idea which comes to complete self-realization in the universal State,
whereas philosophy, being itself only a
preparatory stage, a "love for
wisdom," enables the full manifestation of wisdom, "Sophia" in
social institutions. Leo Strauss bitingly responds that, indeed, "the
coming of the universal and homogeneous state will be the end of philosophy on
earth,"[7] though
for a less abstract reason than that proposed by Kojeve--the political
persecution and physical extermination of philosophers.
Although
the Soviet historical experiment is rarely mentioned, it is implicit throughout
the debate. No wonder, since Alexander Kojeve, a Russian emigré, emerged from
the ideological movement known as Eurasianism which, as early as the 1920s,
expressed a reserved support for the Soviet regime as an embodiment of the
Hegelian impulse to the
As
the
Philosophy
itself, however, survives both its martyrs and its persecutors. Today, from the
perspective of post-Hegelian and post-Marxist historicism, we are in a
privileged position to see what happens after the collapse of the
In
the aftermath of totalitarian regime, the mutual negation of "philosophy
and society" in their attempted synthesis turns into the negation of
synthesis itself, both on the part of politicians who cut back their
ideological claims and on the part of thinkers who withdraw their political
aspirations. This sort of wisdom, which draws a clear line of demarcation on
the basis of historical experience between politics and philosophy while
challenging the effectiveness of the "wisdom-tyranny" union, becomes
possible only in the consequence of a futile, though continuous and
comprehensive ideocratic experiment. What gives a unique and universal
significance to the "deferred" wisdom of Russian thought in the late
Soviet and post-Soviet periods is its ability to pronounce a competent judgment
on Hegelian and Platonic conceptions of the ideal State from within the
"attained" reality of this very State.
Thus,
in the 20th century Russian thought found itself at the crossroads of the two
major historical tendencies of Western philosophy, one appealing to the
"practical implementation" of philosophy and urging its synthesis
with the State, the other warning of the disastrous outcome of a union that
would give birth to political monsters.
No other national philosophy has been so agonizingly divided between
these tendencies and so well qualified to testify to the meaning and outcome of
this conflict.
The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind
and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own.
Theodor
Adorno. Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, 34
The
last period of the Soviet ideocracy, approximately from the early 1970s through
the late 1980s, can be characterized as a period of "philosophical
awakening," to use the felicitous expression of the theologian Georgy
Florovsky (1893 - 1979). "Such awakening is usually preceded by a more or
less complicated historical fate, the abundant and long historical experience
and ordeal, which now becomes the object of interpretation and discussion. Philosophical
life begins as a new mode or a new stage of national existence... One can feel in the generation of that epoch some irresistible attraction to
philosophy, a philosophical passion and thirst, a kind of magical gravitation
toward philosophical themes and issues."[9]
Florovsky refers here to the first "philosophical awakening"
of Russia in the span of years from 1830s to 1840s: roughly, the generation of
Chaadaev, early Westernizers and Slavophiles, such as Belinsky, Herzen,
Bakunin, Khomiakov, the brothers Aksakov, and the brothers Kireevsky.[10]
Russia's
second philosophical awakening occurred in the first two decades of the
20th century, following in the wake of the unsuccessful revolution of 1905
and disenchantment of the most refined part of intelligentsia with
the low intellectual level of populism, Marxism and other socialist theories. This intellectual renaissance is
associated with the philosophical collection Signposts (1909) and the
work of Merezhkovsky, Rozanov, Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Frank, Florensky, Shestov,
and other outstanding representatives of the so-called Silver Age.
Finally,
after the soporific years of Soviet materialist scholasticism, a third philosophical
awakening occurred in the 1970s-80s. In this period, philosophical works were
circulated in various forms of "samizdat"
("self-publishing"), "tamizdat"
("there-publishing," i.e., in the West) and "togdaizdat "
("then-publishing," i.e., in prerevolutionary
The
new philosophical renaissance had its origins in the period from mid-1950s
through the early 1960s, when Khrushchev's thaw evoked, for the most part
unintentionally, new trends of thought
implicitly independent of, or even opposed to official Marxism, or radically
transforming it. From the late 1980s to the early 1990s these undercurrents
rose to the surface and may be classified more or less objectively. Before we
suggest such a classification, the reader should bear in mind that in
Over
the past forty years, several "filosofical" schools have emerged to challenge
the ideocratic principles of Soviet Marxism which itself has undergone
remarkable changes. Below, I will
briefly outline seven principal trends of Russian thought of the 1950s-1980s.
1.
Marxism. One principal vector of
its transformation in the post-war period was the infusion of nationalism into
Marxism, undertaken first by Stalin in his work on linguistics, where the class
categories of traditional Marxism were abolished in favor of a notion of
national unity, as exemplified in the integrity of national language. This tendency resurfaced in the 1980s, with
the increasing rapprochement of official Marxism and grass-roots, nativist
ideology, which later grew into a political alliance of communists and neo-fascists. Another revisionist tendency, toward the
humanization of Marxism, emerged in the mid-1950s with the publication of
Marx's early Philosophical-Economical
Manuscripts, and found expression in the writings of Evald Ilyenkov,
Genrikh Batishchev, and Yakov Mil'ner-Irinin. This tendency suffered a severe
political blow with the 1968 failure to build "socialism with a human
face" in
Later,
in the 1980s, three new approaches to Marxism emerge. The first is an attempt to revitalize and
modify Marxism in the wake of the failure of the Soviet communist project. This
version of post-communist Marxism, exemplified in the work of Sergei Platonov,
proposes the purification of Marxism from its Leninist and especially Stalinist
contaminations and the incorporation of new realities, such as the persistent
success of market economics. The second approach argues that Leninism and
Stalinism are consistent with the premises of Marxism, which must therefore be held responsible for
all of communism's crimes against humanity.
This version, developed in the writings of Alexander Yakovlev, the chief
official ideologist of perestroika, involves the radical criticism of Marxism
as a non-scientific and anti-humanist theory which, with its all-inclusive
determinism, underestimates the sovereignty of consciousness, reducing
personality to a function of social circumstances. The third approach, which can be called
post-Marxist communism (as distinct from post-communist Marxism), glorifies the
religious aspects of communism, which were abandoned by classical Marxism in
favor of a quasi-scientific materialism.
This position, articulated in the works of Sergei Kurginian and, to a
lesser extent, Aleksandr Zinoviev, promotes a renewal of communism as a
religious doctrine encompassing the deepest insights of many Eastern and
Western faiths and opposed to the soulless hedonism and consumerism of
capitalist civilization. Thus Marxism is
presented as the latest form of "humanist religion" that might
save humanity from the pitfalls of
bourgeois individualism through high spiritual ideals and collectivist
aspirations.
2.
A number of new methodological approaches starting from the late 1950s may be
united under the title of neo-rationalism. Yury Lotman (1922-1993), the
founder of the
3.
Among the most influential intellectual trends in the 1970s - 1980s are
varieties of religious thought, including orthodox Christianity as well
as synthetic, occult, non-traditional teachings. Christian visions of history and contemporary
society were powerfully expressed by such major writers as Boris Pasternak and
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who inspired many other thinkers. Father Aleksandr Men’
(1935-1990) was by far the most influential Russian theologian and Orthodox
spiritual leader of the 1970s-80s. In his seven-volume treatise, In the Search of the Way, Truth, and
Life, as well as in his other books,
he elaborates a philosophy of spiritual ascension that leads humanity from paganism to
the Christian revelation of Godmanhood. A different, syncretic trend was
expressed by Daniil Andreev (1906-1959) in his treatise The Rose of the World (1950-1958). Andreev develops an original
"meta-historic" and "trans-physical" vision that attempts
to absorb the religious wisdom of both West and East and to pave a way for a
future "inter-religion" and harmonious world order based on a
universal theocracy. Other influential trends in religious philosophy include
"the philosophy of the common cause," originating in Nikolai Fedorov's
ideas about the universal resurrection of the dead, physical immortality and
the technological transformation of the cosmos.[14] Nikolai Roerikh's version of Oriental
mysticism and many other para-philosophical, Gnostic and occult teachings are
also being intensely promoted and publicized by numerous intellectual groups. A
younger generation of religious, mostly Orthodox thinkers is represented by
Evgeny Barabanov, Tatiana Goricheva, Sergei Khoruzhii, and Vladislav Zelinsky.
4.
Many thinkers and intellectual writers represent various trends of personalist
philosophy whose supreme values are freedom and the individual. No comprehensive systematic treatises have
been produced in this field, but there are numerous essays, articles and
philosophical diaries by Mikhail Prishvin (1873-1954), Iakov Druskin (1902 -
1980), Lidiia Ginzburg (1902-90), Alexander Esenin-Vol'pin, Grigory Pomerants,
Boris Khazanov, Mikhailo Mikhailov, and Boris Paramonov. The formation and
self-awareness of personality, its attitudes towards nature and society, love
and death, and time and fate are the central motifs of personalist thought.
This tradition of philosophical liberalism and pluralism has attracted
influential supporters in the field of politics, such as academician Andrei Sakharov
and historian Natan Eidel'man (1930-89), as well as outstanding proponents in
poetry and fiction, including Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) and Andrei Bitov, both
of whom express personalist views in their essayistic writings and
philosophical prose.
5.
Nationalist ideology, which emerged in the early 1970s and escalated rapidly in
post-communist
6.
Another important trend of the 1970s-1980s is culturology, the
philosophy of cultural dialogue and self-determination through “otherness.” It
received powerful impetus from Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), who asserted in his
later works that "a culture exists only on the border of other
cultures." Another strong influence came from Aleksei Losev (1893-1988),
who developed his philosophy of "dialectical idealism" and
"absolute mythology" primarily on the material of classical antiquity
(History of Classical Aesthetics, in
8 volumes, 1963-1988). Younger representatives of culturology include Vladimir
Bibler who managed to create his own methodological school of "dialogical
logic" in the history of sciences and humanities; and Sergei Averintsev, a
brilliant scholar in the field of antiquity and Byzantine civilization who has
elaborated the philosophical aspects of cultural heritage and innovation,
giving special emphasis to the problems of symbol and the interaction between
religious and secular types of culture.
7. Poststructuralism.
The latest trend worthy of mention corresponds to the post-structuralist
paradigm in the West. One of its most original versions may be identified as conceptualism.
This name usually refers to a well-known movement in Russian arts and
literature of the 1970s and 1980s, but it can also be aptly applied to a broad
spectrum of critical and philosophical ideas that complement and highlight this
movement. Conceptualism assumes that certain conceptual schemes underlie the
ideological construction of reality and determine its artificial,
conventionalized character. Conceptual thinking is imbued with irony, parody,
and a sense of relativity, since "truth" and "reality" are
considered to be empty categories. The relationship between conceptualism and
Marxism is somewhat reminiscent of the dispute between nominalists and realists
in the epoch of the medieval scholastics: whereas Marxists assert the
historical reality of such concepts as collectivism, equality, and freedom,
conceptualists demonstrate that these notions are either contingent on mental
structures or derived from linguistic structures. Every cultural form is
conceived in terms of combinations of pre-established codes, such as Soviet
ideological language or the code of the Russian psychological novel. The
general approaches of conceptualism can be found in theoretical and artistic
works by Andrei Siniavsky, Ilya Kabakov, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid,
and Boris Groys.[15]
Another
version of philosophical poststructuralism is presented by the Laboratory of
Non-Classical Philosophy at the
Of
course, the above-mentioned seven philosophical movements do not exhaust the
entire complexity of intellectual life in
Rarely
in the history of thought has philosophy represented such a liberating force as
it did in
The
newest, post-totalitarian impulses of Russian thought are most clearly
recognized in the scope of its self-criticism in the late 1980s and early nineties.
Such criticism has been indispensable for all three Russian philosophical
awakenings and is reminiscent of Chaadaev's and Signposts' relentless denunciation of the entire national
intellectual tradition.
It is noteworthy, first and
foremost, that this self-criticism develops parallel to the unprecedented
revival and influence of the Russian spiritual heritage. The rediscovery of
Russian religious philosophy, or "idealism," as it had been
scornfully labeled in the Soviet period, was the most significant event in the
intellectual life of the late 1980s. Owing to the circulation of samizdat and
emigrant publications, the works of Berdyaev, Shestov, and Rozanov had already
been widely read among the intelligentsia since the 1960s, but it was only in
1987 that a special decree by the Central Committee of the Communist Party
sanctioned the unfettered publication of these previously forbidden thinkers.
The reception of their legacy during
the 1960s and 1970s among non-conformist intelligentsia was one of unanimous
enthusiasm; in a time of atheistic and materialistic barbarism, these thinkers
were seen as the bearers of a true religious and philosophical wisdom.
Certainly, as compared with Soviet-style philosophers, and even with Lenin and
Marx, Soloviev and Berdyaev were perceived as real thinkers, committed to
philosophy as a repository of ultimate concerns and not merely as a practice of
political speculation and indoctrination. This overall reverence for the
domestic tradition of philosophical idealism
extended through the first years of glasnost, till 1988-89.[17]
Almost immediately, however, upon
the free circulation of their works, this philosophical consortium began to be
divided, with each thinker adopted as a mouthpiece for a specific intellectual,
religious, or political movement. Thus Pavel Florensky and Sergei Bulgakov were
appropriated by adherents of the predominantly conservative strains of Orthodox
thinking,[18] while
Vladimir Soloviev and Nikolai Berdyaev appealed primarily to religious liberals
and ecumenists. The latter were dissatisfied with the stagnant conditions of
Orthodoxy dating back to pre-Revolutionary times and sought innovations in
church dogma and new sources of spiritual inspiration, in particular, the
reunification of Christian churches and more open interaction between the
Church and secular culture. Ivan Ilyin became the primary authority for
conservative nationalists and monarchists, while Georgy Fedotov was adopted by
those who wanted to combine their allegiance to Christianity with an openness
towards the Western values of individual freedom. Vasily Rozanov attained the
greatest popularity, partly because his chameleon-like, consciously eclectic
mentality appealed to the broadest range of convictions and, more importantly,
because his sincere, diaristic style justified the priority of everyday
personal life, especially of sex and family, over any sort of ideological or
religious conviction. Lev Shestov, as brilliant a stylist as Rozanov and even
more sharply agnostic and existentialist, enjoyed less popularity, perhaps
because of his predominantly critical approach and lack of any positive
program.
Though his fragmented, cryptic and
highly idiosyncratic writings were published only posthumously and were read by
a few devotees, the most revered, even
idolized, thinker was Nikolai Fedorov, the founder of Russian
"cosmism" and "the philosophy of the common cause," which
was regarded by his fervent followers as the greatest spiritual revelation
since Christ. Another self-styled
prophet, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, was greeted coldly and even with an undertone of
hostility, perhaps because his revolutionary rhetoric and messianic
proclamation of a new religion of the Third Testament placed him in direct
opposition to the official Orthodox Church. Nikolai Lossky and Semyon Frank
attracted respect, but not too much excitement, since their writings, in
particular those devoted to the theory of knowledge, are elaborated in a
technically philosophical language and are restrained in their ideological and
eschatological claims, which tend to appeal to a wider audience.
Following the initial, unanimously
enthusiastic response to the legacy of Russian religious philosophy as a whole,
and its subsequent partisan differentiation, came a third stage of reception.
Again it was taken as an integral phenomenon, but now in a more critical,
sometimes completely negative, interpretation. Marxist philosophers used to
criticize Russian religious thought ("idealism") as the manifestation
of a reactionary, bourgeois or feudalist worldview, incompatible with
scientific and social progress. New critics, including Evgenii Barabanov,
Sergei Khoruzhii, and Boris Paramonov, on the contrary, blame Russian idealism
for its secret or unconscious complicity with the communist Revolution, by
supposedly preparing the ground for this social cataclysm through the dissemination of apocalyptic forebodings. In
this view, Russian society proved so receptive to the messianic revelations of
Marxism and the mystique of the last bloody battle and coming golden age,
precisely because Soloviev, Fedorov, Berdyaev, and Merezhkovsky had already
tuned the soul of the nation to the key of eschatological expectations that
would be fulfilled, or at least precipitated, by their contemporaries and compatriots--by
Russia as the vanguard of post-history. Virtually none of the great Russian
philosophers (with a partial exception of Vladimir Soloviev) was an
evolutionist, none of them developed a system justifying gradual improvement of
existing conditions; rather, all of them were either metaphysical radicals, who
valorized cataclysmic solutions for historical problems (like Fedorov and
Berdyaev), or existential skeptics (like Shestov or Rozanov) who doubted the
bourgeois values of rationality and productivity.
From this critical point of view,
Russian philosophy was anti-Marxist and anti-communist only because it was
inherently anti-bourgeois and regarded Marxism and socialism as mere extensions
of capitalist, philistine ideals. Thinkers like Fedorov and Berdyaev condemned
Marxism not for its revolutionary ambitions but because it seemed
insufficiently revolutionary, promising only better modes of production instead
of a spiritual transformation of the earth. Therefore, the anti-communist
stance of these thinkers expressed even more ardent hatred for the existing
world, in that the total eschatological renovation they envisioned threatened
to claim even more victims than the metaphysically more moderate and
materialistically motivated Marxism of Lenin and his followers.
The new criticism offered by
Barabanov, Khoruzhii, Paramonov and others, of course, does not attempt to justify
Marxism as such, but demonstrates that the Russian version of Marxism proved to
be a much more dangerous and destructive doctrine precisely because of its
synthesis with the eschatological "Russian Idea" as professed by
idealist and anti-Marxist thought. The paradox of this critical examination of
Russian religious philosophy is that it now comes from religious thinkers themselves, who regard the very phenomenon of religious philosophy with suspicion,
both from religious and philosophical points of view. Soloviev advanced as the
task of his philosophy a "justification of the faith of the Fathers,"
but does faith need rational justification? And should reason pursue the same
truth that is already given in revelation? As Heidegger put it, "Christian
philosophy is merely wooden iron."[19]
Barabanov argues that Russian
religious philosophy regresses to the medieval model of syncretic unity between
the two disciplines, whereas Western thought has since progressed to the point
of differentiating between philosophy, with its critical analysis of the
boundaries of knowledge, and theology, which deals with issues of revelation
and superrational truth. What Russian thought has neglected from the very start
is the necessity of analytical work that discriminates between faith and
knowledge. In coming late to maturity on the world scene, Russian thought from
the epoch of early Slavophiles (1840s - 1850s) was eager to emphasize its
distinction and even superiority over Western academic thought by claiming that
it could achieve the "free synthesis" of religion and philosophy, as
distinct from the compulsory medieval synthesis that had already been abandoned
in the development of narrowly rationalistic Western thought. The result of
this "neurosis of distinctiveness" (to use Barabanov's term) was the
"ideologization of philosophy, as interested not so much in abstract
theoretical questions as in practical problems of remaking the world and man...
[...] Russian philosophy does not analyze the given but constructs an ideal,
something expected, on the strength of which it attempts to 'transform' the
given."[20]
The attempt to synthesize philosophy
with religion, according to Barabanov, actually led to its subordination to
ideology, to utopian and eschatological visions, since, in the 20th century, it
is ideology, especially totalitarian ideology, that best succeeds in uniting
quasi-philosophical pretensions to rationality and quasi-religious pretensions
to totality. From the standpoint of this criticism, what
Thus the new critics offer a bitter
but useful corrective to the failures of the past, calling for a sort of intellectual redemption for the future.
What then is the task of contemporary Russian philosophy? On this point, the
projections of critics diverge. It is argued, on the one hand, that Russian
philosophy should secularize itself, abandoning both the theological claims of
pre-revolutionary idealism and the ideological claims of Marxism. Hence Russian
philosophy needs to undergo the same process of epistemological self-criticism
and analytical self-limitation that Western philosophy has undertaken in a
variety of distinct movements over the
last two centuries, with Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Derrida.
An additional measure may also be
required, according to such authors as Evgeny Barabanov and Boris Groys. Since
Russian philosophy has long been immersed in its neurosis of distinctiveness,
these thinkers believe it must
submit to psychoanalytic treatment in order to demystify its metaphysical
pretensions, to expose the inferiority complex behind them and heal the birth trauma caused in the 18th
century by medieval
Another point of view, most
persistently elaborated by Sergei Khoruzhii, is that Russian religious idealism
was not purely Orthodox at all, was not even Christian, but essentially
idealistic in a Platonic sense. According to Khoruzhii, the "false"
notion that Platonism prepared the ground for Christianity and remains its most
authentic philosophical foundation, has haunted European thought for centuries,
pervading neo-Platonism, Rationalism, German Idealism and other major systems.
Khoruzhii states that Russian thought is not the sole victim of the Platonic distortion of
Christianity, but may well be the most sorely afflicted. Thus Vladimir
Soloviev's philosophy of pan-unity, which was the source of inspiration for
practically all other trends in Russian religious thought, is based on Plato's
vision of ideal unity, progressively incorporated into the diversity of earthly
entities, which reveals the closeness of
Soloviev's theocratic utopia to
Plato's ideocratic republic.
It is true that Soloviev and his
philosophical followers (sometimes strongly critical about their teacher), such as Sergei Bulgakov, Pavel Florensky, and
Aleksei Losev, tried to overcome or improve the one-sided idealism of Plato
with notions of "religious materialism," "concrete
idealism," or "Sophiology." These improvements presupposed that the world of ideas
must manifest and embody itself materially in the same way that Christ-God
became Christ-Man. Khoruzhii points out, however, that the relationship between
God and man in Christianity is not the same as the relationship between ideas
and objects in Plato. According to the teachings of Eastern church fathers, God
and man are absolutely different by essence (idea), but communicate through
energies (existence, volition). Therefore, genuinely Christian philosophy would
abandon such Platonic and Neo-Platonic conceptions as the total unity of an ideal world and would focus
instead on existential intercourse between man and God, meditating on such
spiritual processes as prayer, repentance, grace, introspection, silence, the
unification of mind and heart--those acts of free will that truly mediate
between the human and divine as distinct entities. The Platonization of
Christianity resulted in the loss of these existential truths and in utopian
temptations of Russian thought: since the idea is a principle of abstraction
and generalization, it was believed that the entire world should be united on
the basis of universal ideas.
One cannot but agree with
Khoruzhii's exposure of the Platonic origins of Russian religious idealism,
though he seems to underestimate the Platonic and Neo-Platonic influences even
in those Eastern church fathers who are
presented in his conception as the staunchest Christian opponents of Platonism.
[21]
Furthermore, it should be added that,
surprisingly, the legacy of Platonism is common to such ideological antagonists
as pre-revolutionary idealists and Soviet Marxists and presupposes a kind of
division of intellectual labor between them. Russian communism emphasized the
material and social aspects of the Platonic utopia, while religious thinkers
emphasized its ideal and spiritual aspects; but the ultimate project of
Platonism is not separation but unification of both worlds: the full
materialization of ideal norms. Therefore, it assumes the complementarity and
even fusion of idealism and materialism.
The Russian intelligentsia of the
second half of the 19th century made its
way from old-style idealism to fashionable materialism, and in the early 20th
century strove to return from shallow materialism to religious idealism; later,
these two counter-movements were repeated in the same order in the early Soviet
obsession with "dialectical materialism" (1920s-1950s) and the
disenchantment with materialism (1960s-1980s). But these seemingly opposite
directions actually evolved within a single Platonic paradigm of socially
active idealism. Materialists and Sophiologists unconsciously converge in
their adherence to the Platonic ideocratic project and work together to
idealize and ideologize human existence, on the one hand, and to materialize
these most abstract ideas in social practice, on the other. Christianity, in
opposition to Platonism, does not impose such universal goals as
"Godmanhood" (Soloviev's basic concept) on all of humankind, but
rather is concerned with the unique dynamic of personal volition and the
acquisition of grace. For this reason Khoruzhii believes that the
"energetical," or existential core of the Orthodox tradition must
still be reexamined and restored, as the premise on which the future of Russian
religious philosophy can be built.
Thus, two distinct and evidently
incompatible projects are advanced for the reform of Russian philosophy: one
(Barabanov's) calls for its complete secularization, its differentiation from
theology and ideology; the other (Khoruzhii's) suggests an even closer, deeper
alliance with the doctrinal and ascetic core of Orthodox Christianity. What
both solutions have in common is their rejection of the Platonic dominance in
the Russian philosophical tradition, both in its explicit form (religious
idealism) and in its undercurrents (Marxist ideology).
It is aptly remarked that Aleksei
Losev (1893-1988), considered the last representative of Russian idealism, was
also the first to identify the Platonic subtexts of the Soviet ideocracy. As a
contemporary commentator remarks, according to Losev "the newly evolving
'materialism' elaborated its own 'kingdom of ideas,' its own mythology and
dogmatics... [...]Therefore, Platonism was for Losev the secret hero of
political storms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. [...] ...Socialist
mythology... according to Losev, naturally implemented Platonism in its
social-political practice..."[22]
Losev himself was ambivalent about the meaning of Platonism; he criticized its
paganism and affiliation with the political system of slavery, but at the same
time he interpreted Orthodoxy as a genuinely Christian Platonism.
One can surmise that this
ambivalence was inherent not only in Losev's work, but in the entire tradition
of Russian philosophy, which aspired to the Christian modification of
Platonism, but actually slipped into its pagan version, the ideology of state
socialism and, accordingly, the totalitarian system of state slavery. The
question is: Now that Platonism, in its Marxist guise, has been overcome by
Russian thought, is it still possible to find inspiration in Platonism as such,
in its most sublime idealistic and religious interpretations? Or does the
experience of Russian history convincingly argue that Platonism has exhausted
itself as a spiritual resource for humanity and that all attempts to
Christianize it are just wishful illusions?
Whatever the answer may be, it is
indisputable that the ongoing relevance
of Platonism for Russian thought can provide the ground for its intensive
dialogue with the Western philosophy also
rooted in Plato's heritage.
SOCRATES: The ideal society we have described
can never grow into a reality or see the light of day, and there will be no end
to the troubles of states, or indeed of humanity itself, till philosophers
become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and
truly become philosophers.
Plato,
The Republic, trans. H. D. P. Lee, 473 C10
That kings should become philosophers, or
philosophers kings, is not likely to happen; nor would it be desirable, since
the possession of power invariably debases the free judgment of reason. It is,
however, indispensable that a king—or a kingly, i.e. self-ruling, people—should
not suppress philosophers but leave them the right of public utterance.
I.
Kant. On Eternal Peace. Second Supplement, trans. Karl Popper[23]
Academic scholarship in the West
tends to be suspicious of the very phenomenon of Russian philosophy. At best,
it is categorized as "ideology" or "social thought." But
what is philosophy?
There is no
simple and universal definition, and many thinkers consider it impossible to
formulate one. The most credible attempt seems to be a nominalistic reference:
philosophy is what Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel were occupied with.
Perhaps, the best-known and most widely cited—if slightly eccentric—definition
belongs to A. N. Whitehead: European philosophy is a series of footnotes to
Plato.[24]
If this is
true, then Russian philosophy must be viewed as an indispensable part of the
Western intellectual heritage, since it provides perhaps the most elaborate
footnotes to Plato’s most mature and comprehensive dialogues: the Republic
and the Laws . Questions of
social ethics and political philosophy, of an individual’s relationship to the
State, of adequate knowledge and virtuous behavior, of wisdom and power, of
religious and aesthetic values, of ideas and ideals as guidelines for human
life—all of these are central to Russian philosophy and exemplify its
continuing relevance to the Western tradition.
Moreover, the very status of ideas in Russian philosophy mirrors Plato’s
vision of them as ontological entities, “laws,” or ideal principles—as opposed
to mere epistemological units, the tools of cognition.
If we try to
single out the central trend of Russian philosophy that can be compared with
those of “rationalism” in French philosophy or “empiricism” in English philosophy, this would be “totalism.”
Such diverse Russian thinkers as Chaadaev and Belinsky, Ivan Kireevsky and
Herzen, Vladimir Soloviev and Vasily Rozanov all put forward the category of “integrity,”
“wholeness,” “totality” (tsel’nost’, tselostnost ‘ ) or “total-unity” (vseedinstvo), which presupposes, first of all, the unity of
knowledge and existence, of reason and faith, intellectual and social
life. Gregory Skovoroda (1722-1794) who
is often dubbed “the first original Russian-Ukrainian thinker” expressed the
following credo in his prayer to God on sending a new Socrates to
Ivan Kireevsky
(1806-1856), a founder of Russian Slavophilism, sought to inaugurate “an
independent philosophy corresponding to the basic principles of ancient Russian
culture and capable of subjecting the divided culture of the West to the
integrated consciousness of believing reason.”[26] Characteristically, Kireevsky derived this
tendency of Russian philosophy from Plato’s heritage, as opposed to “the mind
of Western man [which] seems to have a special kinship with Aristotle,”[27]
that is, with “one-sided abstract rationalism.” Invoking the legacy of Eastern
Christian thought, Kireevsky asserts that “in Greek thinkers we do not notice a
special predilection for Aristotle, but, on the contrary, the majority of them
overtly prefer Plato... probably because Plato’s very mode of thinking presents
more integrity (tsel’nost’ ) in the exercises of mind, more warmth
and harmony in the speculative activity of reason. That is why virtually the
same relationship that we notice between the two philosophers of antiquity
[Aristotle and Plato] existed between the philosophy of the Latin world as it
was elaborated in scholasticism, and the spiritual philosophy that we find in
the writers of the Eastern Church, the philosophy that was especially clearly
expressed by the Holy Fathers who lived after the defection of [Catholic] Rome.”[28] This inclination to relate Russian thought to
Plato in contrast to Aristotle became a hallmark of the Russian intellectual
tradition, which assumed that “... in
Plato’s teaching, religion and philosophy are in the closest contact, but
already in Aristotle’s system philosophy breaks off with religion definitively.”[29]
This Platonic
tendency to integrate philosophical and religious teachings and to implement
them politically culminated in 20th century
One might even
say that the philosophy of the Soviet epoch is the final stage of the
development and embodiment of Plato’s ideas in the Western world. During this
stage, the project of ideocracy came to a complete realization and exhausted
itself. In a certain sense, Russian philosophy both summarizes and
punctuates more than two thousand years of the Platonic tradition and
points the way for a return to foundations that are not susceptible to
idealistic and ideological perversions.
From the 1920s
through the 1940s, the tsardom of
communist ideas succeeded in
equating itself with reality, but beginning in the mid 1950s, stimulated by
Khrushchev’s denunciations of Stalin in 1956, this “ideal republic” increasingly revealed its illusory
quality in a sharp discrepancy with reality. Religious and personalist
philosophy, structuralism and culturology, the philosophy of national spirit—all
of these were attempts to de-ideologize social life and let it take root in
some authentic reality. Ultimately,
Russian philosophy, in the transition to its post-Soviet stage, came to be characterized by conceptualism,
a style of thought that ironically reproduces and exaggerates the world of
abstract ideas to demonstrate their artificial and chimerical nature. All that remained of the principle of
ideocracy by the late 1980s was a museum
of obsolete ideas, a carnival side-show of ideological oddities. A relatively
short period of seventy years sums up a two-millennial adventure of Western
thought that followed Plato’s search for the world of pure ideas. Among these
footnotes to Plato, Soviet philosophy appears to the attentive eye as the final
entry, signifying “The End.”
What was the
role of Marxism in the Platonic drama of Russian philosophy? Marxism, which deduces all ideas from the
economic basis of society, would seem to be diametrically opposed to Platonism.
But let us remember that Marxism is nothing other than a reversal of Hegelian
idealism, the final moment in the self-development of the Absolute Idea. What
is principally new in Hegel, as compared with Plato, is the progressive
historical development of the Idea, but the end of this process is postulated
as the universal State, presumably conceived on the model of the Prussian
monarchy, which embraces the totality of the self-cognizant mind. Both Platonic and
Hegelian idealism culminate with the concept of the ideal State. Although Marx
removed this ideal from the causality of the historical process, it remains in
his system as a teleological motive and grows into a vision of a future
communist society. [30]
Plato, Hegel,
and Marx represent three stages in the development of idealism in its
progressive symbiosis with social engineering: (1) the supernatural world of
ideas, (2) the manifestation of Absolute Idea in history, and (3) the
transformation of history by the force of ideas. For Plato, ideas are abstracted to a
transcendental realm. For Hegel, the Idea is already ingrained as the alpha and
omega of the historical process: it generates, and at the same time
consummates, history in the course of its progressive self-awareness. Marx abolishes the idea as the alpha of
history in order to emphasize the omega-point: the prospect of a historical
culmination of unified humanity in the transparent kingdom of ideas, the
self-government of collective reason.
Moreover,
Marxism potentially proves more staunchly idealistic than even Platonism. According to the Greek philosopher, the world
of ideas exists in and of itself, without necessarily demanding historical
embodiment. For Marx, ideas are
inseparable from the material process and are greedy for realization and
implementation. In his own words, “theory
itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses.”[31] The message of “militant materialism” (Lenin’s
term), as realized in Russia by Lenin and his disciples, was that the power of “progressive”
ideas should not be abstracted from but rather attracted to
material life, even subordinating and transforming the economic basis (hence,
the institution of five-year plans that subordinated the entire development of
the country to ideal projections).
Whereas in Plato and Hegel ideas still soared in the clouds,
constituting a separate sphere of Supreme Mind or Absolute Spirit, in Soviet
Marxism they were grounded in the foundation of material life, from heavy
industry to everyday reality, and from the rituals of party purges to
ceremonial cleansings of neighborhoods. The ruling ideology would not forgive
the slightest flaw or deviation from the purity of ideas; because they had
descended into the substance of Being, they demanded the complete submission of
every person at every moment of his or her life. Soviet materialism proved to
be an instrument of militant idealism, craving ever newer sacrifices for the
altar of sacred ideas.
For these
reasons, the dominant intellectual movement of the Soviet epoch should be
identified not just as Marxism, but as Marxist Platonism, an idealism that
asserts itself as the regulative principle of material life. If Plato, proceeding from idealist
assumptions, deduced the system of the communist State, then Marx, proceeding
from communist assumptions, deduced a system of severe ideocracy that was
realized through the efforts of his most consistent and determined Russian
followers. Materialism became an
ideology, and the very phrase “materialist ideology” came to sound perfectly
natural to Soviet citizens. No less
natural is the term “Marxist Platonism.”
Therefore,
Platonism is the underside of Marxism, and the eventual collapse of the
The development of Russian thought
from the 1950s to the 1980s unequivocally testified against materialist
ideology and communist ideocracy. However, the years following the collapse of
the Soviet system witnessed a resurgence of the Platonic type of ideocratic
discourse, which expresses even more radical tendencies than did Russian
philosophy of the early twentieth century. We use here the term
"radicalism" in the same sense that allowed Karl Popper to apply it
equally to Plato and Marx: "...[U]ncompromising radicalism. [...] Both Plato and Marx are dreaming of the
apocalyptic revolution which will radically transfigure the whole social
world."[32] The material substance of Russian historical
existence is now so exhausted by ideocratic experiment, so rarefied that the
kingdom of absolute ideas again rises up beneath its translucent surface,
tempting thinkers to construct new systems of pan-unity, to accommodate heaven
on earth. Barabanov observes: "...[I]n a situation of an acute identity crisis, in the
anguished attempts to restore the torn threads of forgotten traditions, the ideological and utopian paradigms of Russian philosophical thought
are acquiring a second life. Again the 'Russian idea'! Again the 'special way,'
again 'originality,' again doctrinal preaching instead of the pupil's
desk."[33]
Indeed, if we attempt to summarize
the most recent developments in Russian thought (the early 1990s), we discover
a general tendency for the radicalization of its metaphysical ambitions. This tendency may be identified in such
diverse movements as Marxism, with the eschatological communism of Sergei
Kurginyan; nationalism, with the radical traditionalism of Aleksandr Dugin;
religious philosophy, with the increasing popularity of Nikolai Fedorov's
Cosmism and Daniil Andreev's "interreligious" teaching of The Rose of the World. Even the movements that would seem to be the
most resistant to metaphysical assumptions, such as Structuralism, culturology
and conceptualism, reveal a growing propensity for universalist claims. For
example, the later works of Yury Lotman and Vasily Nalimov are rife with a
metaphysics of chance, contiguity, indeterminism. Georgy Gachev builds much
more ambitious cosmosophical constructions than did his predecessors in
culturology, Bakhtin and Likhachev. The conceptualist group "Medical
Hermeneutics" is much more concerned with metaphysical generalizations
than were the conceptualists of the 1970s and 80s. Is it a coincidence that
this proliferation of new, radical metaphysical discourses has arisen with the
degradation and collapse of the ideocratic system of Soviet power?
I must reiterate that the Soviet
system was not merely a political and legislative entity but was founded on a
metaphysical, even eschatological, vision, officially called Marxism but
stemming also from the prophetic philosophizing of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. Hence the collapse of the Soviet regime left something more than
just a need for governmental reform: it
left a metaphysical vacuum, eager
to be filled. If the prevailing mood among intellectuals in the late Soviet period was to challenge and demystify
ideocracy, then the collapse of that ideocracy generated numerous emulations
and simulations among various intellectual groups, which attempted, at least in
theory, to build a new ideocratic regime on a more firm, nationalistic,
technological and/or religious foundation. Traditionally in
This overall tendency,
characteristic of the Russian mentality in general but aggravated in the early
1990s by increasing political instability, can be called "metaphysical
radicalism." Political radicalism flows from the very core of this type of
metaphysics, which, following Marxist paradigm, does not limit itself to
explaining the world but attempts to change it. At the same time, any politics
with pretensions to radically transforming the world cannot limit itself to the
social, economic, and legislative dimensions, but must entail metaphysical
assumptions. In the contemporary West, politics usually pursues less expansive
goals of partially improving existing systems, and therefore, it is divorced
from metaphysical considerations, or at least pretends to be. Since
Metaphysical radicalism is a
specific type of philosophical discourse that ignores the Kantian critique of
metaphysics and claims to "transcend" the epistemological limits imposed on human cognitive capacities.
It relies on 'revealed', 'self-evident' or 'generally accepted' truth or values
that are directly accessible for human mind.
However, this philosophical mode cannot be identified with the naive
metaphysics that Kant criticized; it aspires not to adequate knowledge but to
the practical transformation of the world, not to truth but to power. For
metaphysical radicalism, epistemological limits remain effective, but
irrelevant, since they can be transcended politically, volitionally, as the
projection of a different world is implemented by the forces of social,
national and technological revolution. This is not a pre-critical, descriptive
but a post-critical, prescriptive metaphysics, one that draws on suppressed
desires and taps the collective unconscious. Western intellectuals are familiar
with this type of fiery speculation through the works of New Left thinkers such
as Herbert Marcuse, but the principal distinction of the majority of
contemporary Russian "New Right" thinkers is their appeal to the
absolute past, to the resurrection of ancestors or the restoration of
Tradition.
It is known that sentences in the
imperative mood cannot be subjected to the criteria of verification. As Roman
Jakobson puts it, "The imperative sentences cardinally differ from
declarative sentences: the latter are and the former are not liable to a truth
test."[34]
"Do this!" as distinct from "S/he has done this" or
"This is done," cannot be challenged by the question "Is it true or not?" The same may
be said of "metaphysics in the imperative mood," which, unlike the
"indicative mood" of pre-Kantian metaphysics, evades critical
challenges to its truthfulness. Kant's critique of philosophical dogmatism was
crucially conclusive in respect to metaphysical "declarations," but
to what extent can it help to demystify the metaphysical "imperatives" that began
proliferate in the 19th and 20th
centuries precisely as a result of Kantian limitations on theoretical reason?
The alliance between metaphysics and politics has
benefits for both of them: as practice, it concentrates on one goal, on
one direction of change; as philosophy, it posits itself beyond truth
and falsehood. A diversity of positions is possible in philosophy only insofar
as it interprets the world, but the task of changing the world leaves one position
-- the one that is sanctioned as correct and mandatory. One of the most famous
Karl Marx's statements on the tasks of philosophy is his 11th thesis on
Feuerbach: "The philosophers have
only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point,
however, is to change it." There is a curious asymmetry in
this proposition: the transition from
"interpreting" to "changing" is achieved at the price of
"variability" which is dropped in the second part of the thesis. It
is possible to interpret the world in
various ways , but presumably there is only one way or
direction of its practical transformation. This is how totalitarian
implications are inherent in the very project of the philosophy as the
practical/political action.
There are strong tensions, originating from diverse ideological
sources, among the representative trends of metaphysical radicalism. For
example, radical traditionalists inspired by such extreme rightist thinkers as René Guénon (1886-1951) and
Julius Evola (1898-1974), condemn Fedorovian Cosmism as a leftist, technocratic
heresy obsessed with the idea of progress and active, self-governed human
evolution. Neo-fascist ideologists of Zhirinovsky's camp condemn radical
traditionalists for their romantic alienation from the contemporary scene and
their obsession with the past.[35]
Nonetheless, these antagonisms serve to underscore the substantial unity of
metaphysical radicalism, not in the specific contents of the individual
projects that fall within its scope, but in the very mode of projective
thinking that establishes a set of ideas about what the world should be, while utterly rejecting the
world as it is. Fedorov, the founder of Russian Cosmism, wrote:
"...philosophy must become the knowledge not only of what is but of what
ought to be, that is, from the passive, speculative explanation of existence it must become an active project of
what must be, the project of universal action."[36]
Not only Fedorovians but radical traditionalists and Neomarxist utopians could
subscribe to this statement of what philosophy should do in the face of the
world problems and what the world should
become in the name of philosophical
ideas. The formula for the political implications of this metaphysical
radicalism can be found in Nietzsche's prophecy: "The time of the struggle
for domination of the globe is upon us; it will be undertaken in the name of
basic philosophical teachings."[37]
Russian metaphysical radicals invoke as model the fate of Nietzsche's own
teachings: German recruits going into the trenches of the first World War with
volumes of Zarathustra in their
rucksacks.
The ideological incompatibility
among Marxist, nationalist and religious discourses, which sharply divided them
in the Soviet period, now becomes more and more irrelevant as these positions
merge in the overarching type of radical discourse. Consider the words of Sergei Kurginyan, one of the chief
ideologist of post-Marxist revival of communism who was the principal political
advisor of the conservative,
pro-communist forces in the Soviet leadership that organized the failed putsch
of August, 1991, and attempted to preserve the Soviet Union as a communist
superpower: "We regard communism not only as a theory but as a new
metaphysics which leads to the creation of a new, global religious teaching...
It contains many fundamental features vitally important for civilization,
features of a new world religion with its own saints and martyrs, apostles and
creed. ...Among the indisputable predecessors of communism we identify Isaiah
and Jesus, Buddha and Lao Tse, Confucius and Socrates... [...] Today there is
no alternative to the communist meta-religion..." [38]
Further, Kurginyan insists that
This example of the discourse of
"metaphysical radicalism" reduces or even erases any difference among
communist, nationalist and religious rhetoric. Another example comes from the
head of the renovated Communist party, Gennady Zyuganov, the strongest
contender for Russian political and ideological leadership in Russia today:
"From the standpoint of ideology and world view, Russia is the keeper of
the ancient spiritual tradition: its fundamental values are sobornost'
[40]
(collectivism), the supreme power of the State [derzhavnost' ], sovereignty [literally: self-sufficiency of
statehood], and the goal of implementing the highest 'heavenly' ideals of
justice and brotherhood in earthly reality."[41] Within a single sentence, phrases
imbued with religious meaning--"spiritual tradition," "sobornost'" and "heavenly
ideals," merge together with "derzhavnost'"
and "statehood," taken from the vocabulary of nationalists, and with
"collectivism" and "brotherhood," the key words of
communist jargon.
Thus we can single out metaphysical
radicalism as one of the most powerful tendencies in contemporary Russian
thought, as a kind of metadiscursive strategy transcending the ideological
differences among previously oppositional
movements.
Another major strategy that shares
the contemporary intellectual scene with metaphysical radicalism is
conceptualism.[42] Like
its counterpart, it suggests a universal mode of speculation: a critical
attitude towards traditional notions of reality and an ironic playfulness with
regard to the sign systems of various ideologies that empties all metaphysical
assumptions of their contents to reveal the bare skeleton of abstract discourse
contingent on a system of arbitrary beliefs.
Conceptualism exposes the "realistic fallacy" of all
"master discourses," discloses the contingency of all concepts and
refuses to ground itself in any reality. As Ilya Kabakov, the leading
representative of Russian conceptualism in art and theory, puts it, "Precisely because of its
self-referentiality and the lack of windows or a way out to something else, it
[the concept] is like something that hangs in the air, a self-reliant thing,
like a fantastic construction, connected to nothing, with its roots in nothing."[43]
Initially, the name
"conceptualism" was borrowed from the international aesthetic school
founded in late 1960s by the American artist Joseph Kosuth. Conceptual art from
the very beginning was connected with philosophy and even claimed to be more
intrinsically philosophical than academic philosophy itself. Kosuth insists
that, "The twentieth century brought in a time which could be called 'the
end of philosophy and the beginning of art.' [...] Art is itself philosophy
made concrete."[44]
Two lines of argument intersect in
this statement. On the one hand, it implies that 20th century art is no longer limited to the creation of material
forms but begins to question the very nature of art and to redefine it with
each specific work. Art, therefore, becomes an articulation of ideas about art.
"...'Conceptual Art' merely means a conceptual investigation of art."[45]
On the other hand, analytical philosophy, as Kosuth proposes, has refuted any
claims by philosophy to enunciate the truth, to make verifiable propositions
about the world, and reduced the task of philosophy to the analysis of its own
language. Therefore, philosophy has lost
its privileged "scientific" status and its claims to universal truth;
in our "post-philosophical" age, its function passes to art, which
creates new concepts, signs and
languages without assuming their credibility. These two processes, the
conceptualization of art and the aesthetization of philosophy, contribute to a
mutual rapprochement and the redefinition of conceptual art as a concrete
philosophy that objectifies and relativizes its own ideas.
Another source of the term
"conceptualism," less evident but perhaps more decisive for the fate
of this movement in
The origins of Russian conceptualist
discourse can be traced to the works of the philosopher, writer, and literary
critic Andrei Siniavsky, particularly to his treatise "On Socialist
Realism" (1959). Instead of either praising socialist realism as the
"truthful reflection of life" (in the words of official Soviet criticism) or condemning it as a "distortion
of reality and poor propagandistic art" (in the words of dissident or
liberal Western criticism), Siniavsky suggested the artistic utilization of the
signs and images of socialist realism, while maintaining a playful distance
from their ideological content.
Among leading representatives of
Russian Conceptualism in the 1970s-1990s one could name, in addition to Andrei
Siniavsky and Ilya Kabakov, artists and
essayists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, poet and theorist Dmitry Prigov,
and philosopher and art critic Boris Groys. Conceptualism may be viewed as a
Russian version of postmodern and poststructuralist discursive strategy which
undermines the credibility of any system of thought by exposing it as a
self-enclosed chain of significations with no outlet to reality. From a conceptualist standpoint, a "concept"
is any idea--political, religious, moral--presented as a pure idea, without
reference to its real prototype or any possibility of its actual implementation. That is why conceptualism, as a philosophy,
is so closely connected with art: the idea is used in its aesthetic capacity,
as a playful and self-sufficient verbal statement or visual projection whose
practical or political application are revealed as delusions. With
conceptualism, any fact, gesture, object, or work of art is exposed as a "concept,"
i.e., a mental act which ironically contemplates its own materialization as
contingent on speculative conventions. Thus the field of philosophical
reflection expands infinitely, subsuming all kinds of concrete objects and
facts and treating them as mental constructions, as general concepts, in such a
way that these concepts claim their existential and material status and
simultaneously expose the counterfeit behind these claims.
Conceptualists view totalitarian
thinking, with its claims of all-encompassing truthfulness, as a kind of
madness: a network of internally
connected though arbitrary propositions presumed
to coincide with external reality. When
considering more properly philosophical ideas, conceptualism playfully
paraphrases metaphysical discourse using Hegelian, or Kantian, or Marxist
rhetorical models for the description of such trivial objects as flies or
garbage. This is not merely an attempt at the ironic deconstruction of
traditional philosophy--it is also a project for the proliferation of new,
multiple metaphysics, each of which consciously demonstrates the contingency of
its central concept, be it Absolute Spirit in Hegel's work or a fly in
Kabakov's treatise "The Fly as a Subject and Basis for Philosophical
Discourse."
In contrast to radical metaphysics
"in the imperative mood," conceptualist simulative systems of thought
could be called "metaphysics in the subjunctive mood," which also
serves to distinguish it from pre-Kantian dogmatism, or "metaphysics in
the indicative mood," with its claims of adequately describing reality as
such. Kabakov argues that any object, however ordinary and trivial, can
rightfully be placed in the center of a philosophical discourse, becoming its
master concept, the universal "first principle": "The work
presented here, the treatise 'The Fly with Wings' almost visually demonstrates
the nature of all philosophical discourse--at its base may lie a simple,
uncomplicated and even nonsensical object--an ordinary fly, for example. But
yet the very quality of the discourse does not suffer in the least as a result
of this. In this very way it is proven (and illustrated) that the idea of
philosophizing and its goal consists not at all in the revelation of the
original supposition (if this can turn out to be an ordinary fly), but rather
in the very process of discourse, in the verbal frivolity itself, in the mutual
suppositions of the beginnings and ends, in the flow of connections and
representations of that very thing."[46]
In addition to demonstrating the contingency of metaphysical systems, Kabakov
accomplishes two other closely related philosophical tasks. By contrasting the superficiality of the
topic with the gravity of his chosen genre, Kabakov not only deconstructs the
methodology of serious philosophy, but elevates the trivial to the status of a
topic worthy of philosophical meditation.
The same device that allows him to deconstruct traditional philosophy,
also serves to construct a new range of philosophies that can assimilate the
words and concepts of ordinary language in all its infinite richness. This pan-philosophical approach can also be
applied to such concepts as "chair" or "table" or
"wall," identifying them
as potential universals that may provide a more vivid elucidation of the world
than such traditional and almost empty concepts as Spirit or Life or Being. The
proliferation of metaphysical systems within conceptualism is conceived as a
way to overcome the metaphysical dimension of discourse, not by the means of
serious analytical criticism (as in Wittgenstein or Derrida), but through the
self-ironic, self-parodic construction of systems that deliberately disclose
their own contingency.
Conceptualism, as postmodernism on
the whole, is sometimes criticized for its aesthetic snobbery and moral
indifference (consider Solzhenitsyn's invectives against "spiritually
impotent" postmodernism in the early 1990s). But Russian conceptualists,
not unlike their Western allies,
emphasize the moral implications of philosophical contingency, which
undermines totalitarian and hegemonic discourse and promotes self-irony as a
mode of epistemological humility. Russian
culture proved to be a fertile ground for the application of conceptualist
theory, owing to the prevalence of ideological schemes and stereotypes
throughout its history, especially during the Soviet period. In the West, the correlation between sign systems and observable reality has been
persistently validated through scientific research and economic practice; while
in
The Russian version of conceptualism
established a theoretical distance between itself and a great number of
metaphysical schemes, potentially
totalitarian and hegemonic discourses that dominated late Soviet and early
post-Soviet culture, including Marxist, nationalist, mystical-esoteric and
other "grand" and "fundamental" discourses. With the
collapse of the Soviet Union, as the official ideology lay in ruins, the
critical sharpness and topicality of conceptualism diminished for a while, but
conceptualists did not remain jobless for long: other ideologies (religious
fundamentalism, national messianism, etc.) came to contend for the
"yawning heights" of the State ideocracy, and their rhetoric escalated
to such a degree of automatization and self-repetition that conceptualism could
set about "working" with them.
If in the 1970s-1980s conceptualism
was neatly opposed to more academic and serious types of humanistic discourses,
such as neo-rationalist or culturological, the 1990s have witnessed a strong
tendency for their consolidation. Just as Marxism, nationalism and religious
fundamentalism have begun to gravitate
toward a unified discursive strategy of metaphysical radicalism, so do
structuralism, culturology and conceptualism, which were clearly divided in the
1970s-80s, tend to comprise a unity in opposition to metaphysical radicalism.
This unity is based, first and foremost, on the poststructuralist notion of the
cultural relativity and contingency of all discourses--the theoretical tenet
that was not alien to structuralism and culturology but was most consistently
and convincingly articulated in conceptualism.
Thus, in the mid-1990s, one can see
a sharp polarization of radical and post-structuralist (or conceptualist, in
the broadest sense) types of discourses with simultaneous neutralization of the
internal ideological differences within both of them.
One can compare the relationship
between Russian conceptualists and metaphysical radicals with the division of
"ironists" and "metaphysicians" among Western
intellectuals, as described by Richard Rorty. "...The metaphysician is
someone who takes the question 'what is the intrinsic nature of (e.g., justice,
science, knowledge, Being, faith, morality, philosophy)?' at face value. He
assumes that the presence of a term in his own final vocabulary ensures that it
refers to something which has a real
essence. [...] The ironist, by contrast, is a nominalist and a historicist. She
thinks nothing has an intrinsic value, a real essence." The position of
ironists is summarized in this way: "never quite able to take themselves
seriously because always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves
are subject to change, always aware of the contingency and fragility of their
final vocabularies, and thus of their selves."[47]
If the metaphysician's "final vocabulary" includes such concepts
as "true," "good,"
"right," "the
Church," the Revolution," "professional standards,"
"progressive," "creative," etc., then the terms preferred
by the "ironist" are those that denounce the very possibility of "final vocabulary," including
"perspective," "conceptual framework," "historical
epoch," "language game," "redescription,"
"vocabulary" and "irony." The ironists share the
conceptualist position in relation
to "eternal values,"
"self-evident truths," and "global imperatives" as advanced by metaphysical radicals.
However meaningful, this parallel
with Western intellectual types needs certain corrections. Russian metaphysical
radicals are not just "metaphysicians" in Rorty's sense, i.e.
"realists" opposed to "ironists" as
"nominalists." Metaphysical radicals not only believe in "real
essences," they summon us to transform the world in accordance with their
vision of these essences. As for conceptualists, they are not only "aware
of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies, and thus of their
selves"; they purposefully and sometimes aggressively eliminate and
ridicule all existing vocabularies, directing their "redescriptions"
against both "rightist" and "leftist" metanarratives
whenever these lay claim to "intrinsic values."
This "extremity" on both
sides, metaphysical radicalism and conceptualism, certainly deepens the split
between these intellectual positions and
diminishes the chances of their mediation and neutralization in the framework
of a purely scientific or scholarly discourse.
On the surface, metaphysical radicalism and conceptualism seem wholly
incompatible, even antagonistic, since the former pushes the seriousness of
metaphysics to the extreme of prophecy and propaganda, while the latter reduces
it to an act of linguistic buffoonery. Indeed, metaphysical radicals have
nothing but contempt for "futile" and "foolish"
conceptualist games, whereas conceptualists pointedly ridicule
"dangerous" pretensions of philosophically intoxicated radicals.
But, essentially, the current
radicalization and conceptualization of metaphysical discourse may be regarded
as two aspects of the same process. The more radical metaphysical assumptions
become, the more they reveal their potentially conceptualist nature. It is not
by chance that Russian conceptualism emerged as the ironic duplication of the
totalitarian discourse of Soviet Marxism: as new, post-Marxist modes of radical
discourse become politically influential, conceptualism easily assimilates them
for its ironic repertoire of empty cultural codes.
The conceptualist component in
contemporary Russian thought cannot be reduced to a merely parodic gesture. The
point is that radical discourse itself increasingly reveals internal conceptual
qualities; the more an idea is pushed to extremes, the more it exposes its lack
of referent and the pure schematism of its abstract speculation. For example,
on the political scene, the Zhirinovsky phenomenon may be explained as an
intersection of radical and conceptualist modes, making him the equivalent of a
"postmodern Hitler." The title of Zhirinovsky's autobiography-manifesto,
The Last Rush to the South , could
easily have been taken from the oeuvre of
Dmitry Prigov's conceptualist verses. The very idea of Russian soldiers washing
their boots in the Indian Ocean presents a combination of political radicalism
(the Russian Empire stretched to the continent's Southern margin) and the
aesthetics of conceptualism (an idea that is ruthlessly consistent in logical
or ideological terms demonstrates its ridiculous irrelevance and folly).
The regeneration of totalitarianism
after the death of totalitarianism cannot but incorporate a conceptualist
self-subversive mediation. That is why new radicalism, from the very start, is
doomed to be conceptually loaded, though rarely to the point of
self-realization, unlike conceptualism in a proper sense. Some subtle observers
find even in Zhirinovsky's extremist escapades a kind of conscious buffoonery
that plays with the signs of aggressiveness rather than actually pursues it.[48]
In most cases, however, radicalism acquires a conceptual dimension
unintentionally, whereas conceptualism
quite purposefully engages into radical discourse and demonstrates both luxury
and poverty of thus constructed metaphysical systems.
Such a deliberate symbiosis of
radicalism and conceptualism may outline the perspective for a new Russian
metaphysics, which will give a postmodern dimension to a traditionally Russian
holistic, potentially totalitarian, way of thinking.[49]
While Western postmodern discourse remains predominantly critical and
self-critical, as seen in the pervasive influence of deconstruction with its
demystifying and anti-metaphysical claims, Russian postmodern thought tends to
emphasize its metaphysical disposition, finding the antidote to metaphysical
indoctrination in its very excesses. Where Western thought prefers to
mediate opposites and ground itself in "neutral," scientifically
sound terms, Russian thought deliberately moves in the polar directions of
excessive prophecy and relentless irony, pendulating between two opposites instead
of attempting their rapprochement and stable synthesis.
One can imagine a kind of
monolithic, though ambivalent, metaphysical discourse where the seam between
radical and conceptualist ingredients becomes indistinguishable. The tendency
for such symbiotic philosophizing is now evident both on the side of
metaphysical radicalism, which cannot but locate itself in postmodern,
post-totalitarian space, and conceptualism, which demonstrates an increasing
proclivity for almost sincere, invariably grandiose and self-derisive,
self-erasive metaphysical speculation[50].
* *
*
Russian intellectual history is a
history of thought that fights desperately to escape the prison of an
ideocratic system created by the strenuous and sacrificial efforts of thought
itself. What makes Russian thought so unique is its internal tension, its
struggle against itself, against its own ideational constructions and social
extensions.
In the West, the field of philosophy
is more or less clearly divided into ontology, the philosophy of being, and
epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge. In
Till now,
[1] This research was supported from funds provided by the National Council for
Soviet and East European Research (
[2]The article "Michurin," in Philosofskii slovar', ed. by M.
Rozental and P. Yudin,
[3]Ivan Michurin. Sochineniia, in 4 volumes,
[4]It was usual during the
post-revolutionary epoch to speak about the Party as "the collective
reason [razum] of the people," or about the Politbureau as "the
collective reason of the Party."
[5]I am thankful to Dr. Eve Adler of
[6]Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, Including the Strauss-Kojeve Correspondence, ed. by
Victor Gourevich and Michael S. Roth,
[7]Ibid., p.211.
[8]Ibid., p.175.
[9] Rev. Georgy Florovsky. Puti russkogo bogosloviia (1937). 4th
ed.
[10]According to Florovsky, for the previous
generation of Russian intelligentsia, of the 1810s - 1820s, it was poetry (Zhukovsky, Batyushkov,
Griboedov, Pushkin) that played the role of cultural magnet. The same is true
about Soviet intelligentsia which in the late 1950s - early 1960s was obsessed
with poetry and whose idols were Evtushenko, Voznesensky, Akhmadulina, and
Okudzhava. Already in the late 1960s - early 1970s they surrendered their
influence not to other poets, but to thinkers and scholars, such as Mikhail
Bakhtin, Yury Lotman, and Sergei
Averintsev. Florovsky has coined a
formula for such a process of maturation: "From the poetical stage Russian
cultural-creative consciousness transfers into the philosophical stage"
(Florovsky, op.cit., p. 236).
[11]In his younger years, 1875 - 1881,
Soloviev lectured at
[12]Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin. Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford
(
[13] There is an irony to be discussed later
in the rapprochement of Marxism, Orthodoxy and nationalism within metaphysical
radicalism.
[14] A leading exponent of this movement, Svetlana Semyonova, is one
among very few women engaged in
contemporary philosophical debates in
[15]Philosophical aspects of conceptualist
movement will be treated more extensively in the last sections of this
article.
[16]These projects will be briefly discussed
in the section 5 of this article
("New Metaphysical Radicals").
[17]See, for example, the
"commemorative" and "resurrective" articles on Russian
philosophers published in 1987 and 1988 in Literaturnaia
gazeta and translated into English
in Russian Literature - Russian Thought:
From the History of Twentieth-century Russian Philosophy, a special issue
of Soviet Studies in Literature ,
Spring 1990, v.26, No.2 (articles on Soloviev, Rozanov, Florensky, and others).
[18] A reservation would be appropriate here
that the most fundamentalist circles of
Orthodoxy blame Bulgakov and Florensky, especially their teachings on Sophia,
the Wisdom of God, for particularly sophisticated
and dangerous heresies introduced into the very heart of Christian dogmatics.
[19]M.Heidegger. Phänomenologie und Theologie. Fr.a.M., 1970, S. 32.
[20]E.V.Barabanov. Russian Philosophy and the
Crisis of Identity. Russian Studies in
Philosophy. Fall 1992, vol.31, No.2, pp.25, 46.
[21]Thus, for Khoruzhii, the most
authoritative source of Christian existentialism as opposed to Platonic
idealism is Gregory Palamas (1296-1359),
Orthodox monk, theologian, and intellectual leader of Hesychasm, an ascetical
method of mystical prayer. One should
not forget, however, that in his youth
Saint Gregory mastered the classical
philosophies of antiquity at the imperial university; according to
Encyclopaedia Britannica, "in his
fusion of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, used as a vehicle to express
his own spiritual experience, Palamas set a definitive standard for Orthodox
theological acumen."
[22]L. A. Gogotishvili. Mifologiia khaosa (o
sotsial'no-istoricheskoi kontseptsii A. F. Loseva), in Voprosy filosofii, 1993, No.9, 48, 49.
[23] I. Kant. Werke, ed. by E. Cassirer, 1914, vol. 6, p. 456.
[24] Antony Flew refers to this definition in
the introduction to his work A Dictionary
of Philosophy.
[25] Gregory Skovoroda. Socrates in Russia,
in Russian Philosophy, ed. by James
M. Edie, James P. Scanlan, Mary-Barabara Zeldin with the collaboration of
George L. Kline.
[26]Ivan Kireevsky, On the Necessity and
Possibility of New Principles in Philosophy, ibid., p. 213.
[27]Ibid., p. 182.
[28]I. V. Kireevsky. O kharaktere
prosveshcheniia Evropy (On the Character of European Enlightenment), in his
book Kritika i estetika,
[29]Sbornik
statei v pamiat' stoletiia Imperatorskoi Moskovskoi Dukhovnoi Akademii, Sergiev Posad, 1915, part 1, p.153.
Cited in the article: A.I.Abramov,
"Otsenka filosofii Platona v russkoi idealisticheskoi filosofii"
published in the collection Platon i ego epokha (Plato and his Epoch),
[30] On the totalitarian implications of
Platonism and its connection with
Marxist philosophy, see Karl R. Popper. The Open Society and Its Enemies .
[31] K.Marx, Contribution to the Critique of
Hegel's Philosophy of Right:
Introduction, in The Marx-Engels Reader,
ed. by Robert C.Tucker,
[32]
K. R. Popper. The Open Society and
Its Enemies, vol. 1, The Spell of
Plato,
[33]E. V. Barabanov. Russian Philosophy and
the Crisis of Identity, ed. cit., 48.
[34]Roman Jakobson. Language in Literature , ed. by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy.
[35]See, for example, the criticism of
radical traditionalism in the neo-fascist journal Ataka (no date and place,
No. 12, pp. 32-34) whose editor Sergei Zharikov is the main ideologist and the
minister of culture in the "shadow" government of Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
[36] N.Fedorov. Filosofiia obshchego dela.
Cited in V. V. Zenkovsky. Istoriia russkoi filosofii,
[37]F. Nietzsche. Schriften und Entwürfe
1881-1885. Werke/Hrsg. von F.Koegel. 2. Abt. Bd.12.
[38] S. E. Kurginian, B. R. Autenshlius, P.
S. Goncharov, Yu. V. Gromyko,
[39]Sergei Kurginian. Sed'moi stsenarii.
[40]In Russian, the term "sobornost'" means
"togetherness," "the spirit of communality" and has
theological origin and connotations (the spiritual experience of Russian
Orthodox church). By adding "collectivism" as its synonym, Zyuganov
wants to equate religious and communist
views which is one of the central points of his ideological program
("Christ as the first communist").
[41]Published in the newspaper "Soviet
Russia,"
[42] On Conceptualism see Mikhail Epstein,After the Future: The Paradoxes of
Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture, with an introduction and
transl. by Anesa Miller-Pogacar,
Amherst: Massachusetts University Press,
1995, pp. 30-37, 60-70, 200-203; Mikhail Epstein, The Philosophical
Implications of Russian Conceptualism, forthcoming in Duke University press,
1997.
[43] Ilya Kabakov. Conceptualism in
[44] Joseph Kosuth. Art after Philosophy and After. Collected Writings, 1966-1990.
[45]Ibid., p. 84.
[46] Kabakov, "The Fly as a Subject and
Basis for Philosophical Discourse", in: Zhizn' mukh. Das Leben der Fliegen.
Life of Flies , p. 224.
[47]Richard Rorty. Ironists and
Metaphysicians, in The Truth about Truth.
De-confusing and Re-constructing the Postmodern World, ed. by Walter Truett
Anderson,
[48] Elena Zheltova, "Vladimir Zhirinovsky:
Carnival Barker" (a manuscript).
[49] Already, a recent trend in Russian
intellectual prose, exemplified by Dmitry Galkovsky's novel-treatise, Endless Dead End (Beskonechnyji tupik),
indicates potential directions for the radicalist-conceptualist mode of
thinking.
[50]It is on the crossroads of radicalist and
conceptualist discourses that this author situates some of his own writings,
such as New Sectarianism: The Varieties
of Religious-Philosophical Consciousness in Russia, Holyoke, New England
Publishing Co., 1993 (2nd edition: Moscow: Labirint, 1994); Great Sov'. A Philosophical-Mythological
Essay,